Worlds that will leave you feeling shaken for days afterword...

Stop me before I amend my previous post yet again! To stop myself-- to get my mind off its all too human frailty-- I thought it would be best, actually, to write a new one.

I have a couple of new reviews of Claire Light's Slightly Behind and to the Left, which is the 26th volume in Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series, to report. Interestingly, although they come from very different perspectives, they partake of some of the same reactions.

In Claire Light's Chapbook Investigates Surreal Crimes of Astrobiology, Annalee Newitz reviews the book for io9. Reading Slightly Behind and to the Left, Newitz writes,

you'll find yourself drawn into dark, surreal worlds that will leave you feeling shaken for days afterward. In a good way.

A collection of ultrashort "drabbles" and four short stories - two of them linked - Slightly Behind And To The Left is the kind of book where planets are made of cats - but crimes against humanity are still as recognizable as the Moon. Light's prose moves effortlessly between hard science observations and absurdist flights of fantasy.

Writing from a very different, non-genre perspective, Terry Hong, at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program's Book Dragon, also reviews Slightly Behind and to the Left. She notes that "Claire Light’s slim, bright little book threw me for a loop for sure," and concludes: "Indeed, while her readers are the ones who are ’slightly behind,’ Light is … can’t resist … light years ahead reinventing the Asian American experience, feminist sf-style."